We’re off, and it’s a five-hour drive full of chatter, music, joints and piss stops. We finally arrive at the edge of the campsite, which is straight from a 70’s movie set so I wince not expecting too much in the way of facilities or cleanliness. An ageing hippie comes out of the office and looks at the two of us as we park. He’s wearing a shirt open all the way down to his belt, showing a strip of his leathery chest, grey hair receding quite badly, hands full of silver rings. I can’t help giving him a nickname: Grateful Dead, GD for short. I giggle to myself as we walk up to him.
GD shows us to our pitch and tells us the showers and toilets are on the left, and next to the office, on the right, there’s a large common room with tables and board games and an old battered TV that’s chained to the bracket on the wall; he charges £5 deposit for the remote but we can watch for free. There’s a vending machine in there too but if our money gets stuck, tough. I let Chris deal with it all, as I start to unpack the tent.
Chris is smiling as GD walks away. ‘Did you get a load of that guy? Talk about stuck in the past! He probably smoked so much shit he still thinks it’s 1970.’ We laugh and mess around as we put up the tent and set up camp.
We look around the camp, it’s not exactly heaving and I am glad there are no families. I get a glimpse of a couple of dodgy looking bikers hanging around outside the office and can’t explain a feeling of uneasiness. It’s getting dark, so we decide to cook a snack before we check out the common room and all its promised excitement.
There are three other tents scattered about but we see nobody. We tap our muddy boots on the concrete step outside the common room and we enter. There is nobody in there apart from us. GD is sitting in the office with his door open, presumably keeping an eye that nobody sets off with the TV remote. He is eating and watching something on his laptop, probably porn. He nods at us as we sit at one of the tables, outside is now dark and it has
started to rain. A string of pathetic outdoor lights comes on, flickering and buzzing, as the rain hits it. GD shuts his laptop and walks into the room. His thumb and two fingers of his right hand inside three bottles of beer. He joins us at the table. ‘Thought you could do with a beer. On the house, on account of the lack of entertainment tonight. TV aerial is on the blink, we had a storm last night.’
‘Cheers mate’ says Chris and starts chatting to GD like he’s known him forever. I still feel uneasy about him, he looks like the kind of guy who knows stuff he shouldn’t. ‘So, you guys are here to look at the old farmhouse?’
Chris nods and starts telling GD about our ghost hunting trip and the footage we want to take inside the Meat Factory, hoping to get lucky and get something on tape. The Meat Factory is just our nickname for an old farm on the outskirts of the town. Some stranded driver stumbled there one night and was taken in from the storm. He never made it out. When the police found his car, and visited the farm, they found body parts and numerous sausages hanging in the kitchen. The same sausages that were on sale in the town’s market that everyone ate. Except the were no pigs at that farm, not anymore, the Halletts had disappeared. Except for one, Patrick Hallett, the farmer’s son. He was chained by the wrists to the kitchen ceiling, legs amputated, bleeding into a basin below him. He was still breathing when they found him. All sorts of stories emerged, some saying the farmer had lost his mind and killed his family one by one. Others told of a group of people high on coke had gone to the farm to kill, wearing pig masks. People say they started by killing the animals and wearing their faces before they finished the family off.
GD is taking in all of Chris’ babble. I need to silence Chris somehow, don’t want this guy thinking we would be out all day tomorrow and get ideas he could go through our stuff in the tent.
The outdoor lights throw shadows around like someone is walking past. I start to wonder we’re not alone. ‘So where are the others? The people from those other three tents, we didn’t….’
‘They’re gone.’
‘Gone?’
‘I guess something frightened them ‘cause they didn’t even bother to take down their tents and just took off.’
‘But I saw some people outside the office earlier.’
‘Nah, nobody here mate, only you guys and me.’ I wonder why he lied and hope he had a very good reason.
I feel very tired and can hardly keep my eyes open so I throw Chris a look and we down our beers and stagger back to the tent. I feel stoned, which is weird, but I put it down to the joint we had earlier. We barely make it to the tent when we collapse.
I eventually open my eyes slowly and blink once. It looks like a room. I blink again and this time keep my eyes open. It’s a room.
My head is in some kind of metal vice so I can’t turn it, and when I look down my hands are tied together with wire. I turn my eyes to the left and see a door. I turn them to the right and I see Chris sitting against the wall, his head in a vice and his hands tied just like mine. I try to open my mouth but I realize I have gaffa tape across my mouth. I look up and notice hooks on the ceiling, I start to panic and find it hard to breathe through my nose. The room looks familiar and anxiety grabs my chest. We’re in the Meat Factory.
The door opens noisily and I see Chris come to. He jerks his body a little, he must have realized too. We look at each other with fear building and sweat dripping from our foreheads.
GD and the two bikers I saw earlier enter the room. They line up in front of us, the two guys have knives. I feel fear grip me hard, we’re gonna die here tonight.
GD is holding a shotgun and nods to the others as he comes right up my face.
‘I don’t think he’s going to scream if we take the gag off, I can tell. You’re not going to do that, are you?’ And he runs the tip of the shotgun against my cheek. He rips the gaffa tape off and it feels like he has taken off my lips with it.
He turns to rip off Chris’ tape, who moans pitifully.
I wish Chris would keep it together, I don’t want this to get any worse. One of the guys picks up a ghetto blaster at the back of the room and turns it on. Heavy metal music pours out and fills the room. They look coked out of their faces and it’s not good news.
‘What should we do with them first?’ asks one.
‘Let’s untie them, I want to watch them squirm’ They do, and pull us to our feet by the scruff of our necks. We hear a massive bang on the door which makes it shake furiously.
They look panicked and the ghetto blaster is abruptly turned off. One of the guys slowly opens the door and steps out to have a look, we hear him shouting ‘Who the fuck is out there? If I catch you, you will be fucking sorry!’ Then nothing. GD signals to both to go and see what’s going on.
‘Let us go, man’ I say, hoping he’ll listen. ‘We just want to go, won’t tell a soul what happened, we’re never coming back either, I swear.’
GD is looking agitated ‘Shut the fuck up, I need to think!’
I think I’ve got his attention so I start messing with his mind a little hoping he will crack. ‘I know you are not like them, you’re a hippie man, let us go we’re gonna get out of here tonight and we will keep our mouths shut, won’t we Chris?’ Chris nods eagerly ‘That’s
right man, we’re just gonna go, I can give you some cash too, I’ve got about £200 in the tent, you can have it.’
‘I took that already, you asshole!’ He paces the room and keeps looking at the open door. None of the guys have come back yet and the silence is eerie. A horrendous scream cuts through the silence, it’s coming from outside. We hear a few shots fired in the distance then nothing. GD is looking really agitated, he’s probably coming down from the coke and is finding it hard to cope with what’s going on. This is our chance. One of the hooks from the ceiling is quite low and I wonder if I swing it at GD I might just hit him and confuse him for a little while so maybe I can overcome him. As GD looks at the door, Chris grabs the hook and swing it hard towards GD. We had the same idea, so this throws me a little and I just run at GD the moment he is hit. I am like an animal, punching and kicking him but he is still standing. Chris yells at me to get out of the way as he swings the hook hard towards GD. I jump back as the hook enters GD’s scull with a horrific thud and pops out of his eye socket, lifting and swinging him like a carcass in a slaughter house. I stop, Chris picks up the shotgun. I freak out ‘What are we going to do Chris? Those guys are still out there.’
‘Whatever is out there Dave, has got them, we got to get out of here and get to the car. It’s not that far, if we run we can get there in about ten minutes or so.’
‘What if GD has messed with the car?’
‘I don’t think he would, he probably thought about selling it once we…. We have no choice but go for it. We could try and call the police from GD’s room too. One way or another we got to make a run for it.’
So, we step out into the dark and start running, Chris drops the shotgun to run faster and stumbles over a body, I think. It’s so fucking dark apart from the light from the farm. I stop to make sure he’s OK and I look back at the farm. We both do, and for a moment I see
the whole Hallett family standing by the front porch looking at us, they’re covered in blood and are screaming at us.
We hold each other up and run without turning back and hear all sorts of screams and horrific sounds all around us. As we get near the campsite I run smack into something hanging from a tree, as I get up I see that it’s a body hanging with no legs, dripping blood, just like Patrick Hallett was, except this is not him, it’s one of the bikers with his pig mask still on. I recoil and carry on running until we get to our car, door locked, Chris punches the window in anger, I look at the glass and see from the reflection that we are not alone anymore.
[bctt tweet=”OCTOBER TERROR 2018 Short Story Award – Entry #32 ‘THE MEAT FACTORY’ by Robbie Mori – Enjoy all this terrific, disturbing material you have in your hands, lots of horror stories at your disposal for your dark delight and vote!” username=”theboldmom”]
On October 23rd we’ll close submissions and open a poll for the readers to choose their favourite one! You’ll have a week to make your choice and on October 31st we’ll announce the winner!!!
